Advanced Computer Techniques
Advanced Computer Techniques was a computer software company most active from the early 1960s through the early 1990s that made software products, especially language compilers and related tools. It also engaged in information technology consulting, hosted service bureaus, and provided applications and services for behavioral health providers. ACT had two subsidiaries of note, InterACT and Creative Socio-Medics.
Both writer Katharine Davis Fishman, in her 1981 book The Computer Establishment, and computer science historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his 2003 volume From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, have considered ACT an exemplar of the independent, middle-sized software development firms of its era, and the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota has also viewed the company's history as important.
Founding and early history
Advanced Computer Techniques was founded in New York City in April 1962 by Charles P. Lecht. It had an initial capitalization of $800, one contract, and one employee. Lecht, in his late twenties at the time, was a mathematician and entrepreneur whose involvement with the computer industry dated back to the early 1950s, including stints at IBM and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.The new firm's first job was fixing a language compiler on the UNIVAC LARC computer, which was being used by the United States Navy. UNIVAC awarded a $100,000 contract for the work; Lecht hired some programmers and the company's first office was in former servant quarters atop the Plaza Hotel. The firm was one of 40–50 software companies started in the early 1960s, many of which would go on to be forgotten.
Creating compilers became a key part of the company's early efforts; its first compiler, for the FORTRAN language, was developed in the mid-1960s. This was followed by a COBOL compiler later in that decade, then a FORTRAN 77 compiler and a Pascal compiler both in the late 1970s. As the 1960s went on, ACT built a customer list of established companies and developed a reputation for delivering quality work on schedule. In September 1964 the company leased regular office space, the first of several locations it would have during its lifetime, all of which were within greater Midtown Manhattan on or near Madison Avenue. In addition to UNIVAC, early customers for the firm's compiler work included IBM as well as Honeywell.
With few trained computer programmers available at the time, Lecht hired those with musical, linguistic, or mathematical backgrounds, finding them to be successful at this new activity. The firm also did other system software as well as scientific programming projects, including some for the defense industry, and then started doing commercial applications development for large companies such as Union Carbide, United Airlines, Hoffman-LaRoche, and Shell Oil. Lecht fostered a relaxed working environment where dress was informal and hours flexible. He instituted a series of weekly reports that all developers had to file detailing their progress; these were communicated to the client, on the theory that "a client can get angry at us, but can't be more than one week angry at us because we told exactly where we were."
Management personality
Lecht was a colorful and flamboyant character with an idiosyncratic sense of style, who went around on a motorcycle and was described as a "showman" by colleagues, customers, and competitors alike. At one point his office and desk were completely covered by silver square tiles. ACT benefited from his flair for publicity: He, together with the company, was profiled in The New Yorker in 1967 and later in industry publications such as Datamation, which once referred to him as "One of computerdom's most flashy characters". Even decades later, a computing historian recalled Lecht as "one of the real characters in the industry, a very, very unusual man."Lecht published several textbooks on programming covering different languages. ACT organized a series of seminars for the American Management Association on project management for developing computer applications. The seminars were organized into a 1967 book by Lecht, The Management of Computer Programming Projects, that was likely the first book ever published on the topic. The company also published A Guide for Software Documentation in 1969, compiled and edited by Dorothy Walsh, which was again one of the first of its kind and was cited by a number of other publications in the years to follow.
Image:ACT Paean album and Lecht Waves of Change book.jpg|thumb|left|The Paean album and the Waves of Change book
Perhaps the most strangely famous of Lecht's outputs was the album of IBM corporate spirit songs that he had recorded by the Association of British Secretaries in America. Entitled Paean, and with album sleeve text bemoaning the loss of the company-mindedness of the 1930s–1950s, it was released via Skye Records in 1969. It became a popular giveaway at trade shows such as the Joint Computer Conferences. The title track, set to the tune of "Molly Malone", was adapted in praise of Lecht himself:
Lecht's book The Waves of Change, which attempted to foretell changes in the computer industry, was serialized in Computerworld magazine in 1977 and published by McGraw-Hill in 1979. The foreword was written by Gideon I. Gartner, who would soon found the influential information technology research and advisory firm the Gartner Group. Waves of Change sold well and received a positive reception. The books, along with his national speaking and lecturing engagements, bolstered both Lecht's and ACT's visibility within the technology industry.
The eccentricities of the president were balanced by the firm's second-in-command, executive vice-president Oscar H. Schachter, a lawyer who had graduated from Yeshiva College and Harvard Law School and who had a more straight-laced personality. Schachter was a neighbor of Lecht's who did some legal work for the company during its inception, served on its early board of directors for a few years, and then joined the company full-time in 1966. As Schachter later said, "I was kind of the governor... The person who sat on Charlie, or tried to."
While with ACT, Schachter would also become a significant and respected presence in the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations, a rapidly growing industry organization during the 1960s and later. Schacter served in a number of roles with ADAPSO, including providing written testimony to the United States House of Representatives. He became chairman of ADAPSO's vendor relations committee in 1980, a body that engaged in discussions with IBM about that company's policies towards independent software vendors.
ACT was ahead of the industry in hiring female executives. There were several at the vice presidential level in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Expansion and diversification
ACT became a publicly owned company in May 1968. The initial public offering was handled by boutique technology underwriter Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, and the stock value increased almost four-fold during the first day of trading, ending with a three-fold gain that The New York Times termed "spectacular". The firm had captured a wave of investor interest in technology stocks.ACT had revenues in the $2.5-3.2 million range during 1968–70. It began a course of diversification beyond consulting and software development by acquiring, in 1969, Rhode Island Lithograph, a printing company in the state of Rhode Island, and Informatab, a data processing market research company, and by opening Inter-ACT, a training and education arm that wrote computer help manuals that were sold to schools and businesses. Lecht had a goal that ACT be a "supermarket of services for the computer industry". As Schachter would later recall, "We did everything."
Software houses of the time tended to suffer from unprofitable contracts, failed ventures, and slowing demand. During 1971–72, ACT suffered a downturn, showing its first annual losses; Lecht closed several offices and laid off half of the firm's employees, but the firm survived when many others did not. By 1974, its revenues had reached the $5 million mark.
The most important diversification was into service bureaus, which by 1979 accounted for some 40 percent of the company's revenue. These bureaus, which provided their own equipment to handle the data processing needs of clients, were located in New York, Phoenix, Tucson, Edmonton, and Milan, and each tended to specialize in a particular area, such as the Edmonton one reporting on inventory and financial status for the Canadian oil and construction industry. There were also consulting offices for various periods of time in London, Paris, Chicago, and Atlanta.
The company also began entering the packaged software business, developing compilers and related tools as a product. The advent of minicomputers created a market for the compilers and Data General became a major customer. But Lecht's visibility within the industry only went so far; the company lacked an effective marketing capability for its products to go further. In addition, the company struggled with the transition in business models from customers fully funding projects and owning the end results, to an approach where the company would have to make periodic investments in its own products to keep improving them.
During the 1970s, the company established an office in Tehran. Over time IBM withdrew from that market and the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi decided to standardize on the Honeywell 6000 series for the Iranian military. ACT gained a subcontract from Honeywell's Italian subsidiary to do an inventory system for the Imperial Iranian Air Force and Information Systems Iran. The name Inter-Act was again used for this venture. The contract represented up to a quarter of ACT's business for a while, but then ended without ACT being fully paid, and following the Iranian Revolution, ACT became party to the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal. In 1983 it received an award of some $300,000 from the tribunal.
Image:Advanced Computer Techniques thermometer paperweight.jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.8|An ACT promotional item: a room thermometer paperweight
ACT was also an earlier entrant in the word processing field in the mid-late-1970s, acquiring Base Information Systems and its Ultratext System technology and partnering with Honeywell to put the system on the Honeywell Level 6 minicomputer. The product received a positive review in Computerworld in 1976 and was still being actively marketed in 1979. But Wang Laboratories captured much of this word processing market; the Ultratext product may have been overly complicated and Schachter later lamented that ACT letting the opportunity to make an impression in this domain slip away was "one of our worst failures".
By 1979, ACT was effectively a worldwide mini-conglomerate. It had revenues over $16 million and in terms of size was in the top 60 of over 3,000 companies in the software, services, and facilities management sector. It derived approximately equal revenues from overseas as from the U.S. By 1981 the company stated it had 318 employees. Its display advertising for programming positions it was hiring for was a familiar sight in computer trade papers such as Computerworld. It still had its idiosyncratic characteristics; Lecht spoke publicly about a psychologist who visited ACT to discuss employee complaints, saying it saved him two days a week worth of work and predicting it would become a future corporate trend.